Nighttime Film Photography

I recently commented that nighttime street photography goes best when I do it digitally. There have been a handful of times I’ve attempted to shoot life in town at night on film, and each time I’ve come face to face with how difficult low-light film photography is. But with a roll of Ilford Delta 3200 that I intended to use for another application that I ultimately lost interest in pursuing, I decided to give it another go.

Along with a good photographer friend, I ventured out a few weeks ago with my Nikon F just as the sun was setting. It was a warm Friday night, and town was hopping.

Curious to see how a couple of compositions I had shot digitally during my last venture into town at night would compare if I had had a film camera in hand, I attempted to replicate those same compositions on film. First, there was this railroad track that I rather liked in its digital rendition. Compared with the film version, I still think the digital one is better both compositionally and technically.

I’m not so sure I have the same feeling for this shot of a closed restaurant:

The digital version has more contrast pop, but I really like the graininess and tonality of the film version.

Where I placed focus also had a big effect. In the digital version, I had my camera’s autofocus turned on. It grabbed hold of the legs on the upside-down stool second from the foreground. (One of the many advantages of shooting raw is that, for later reference, the camera saves which autofocus points it used upon making the exposure to the file.) I distinctly recall taking the shot quickly with my camera’s lens almost in contact with the window glass I was shooting through. But since my Nikon F is a manual-focus camera—indeed, it’s a manual-everything camera—I had to make a decision about where to place focus. Instinctively, I picked the illuminated case on the left. I’m not sure if I intended to blur out the foreground or if I naturally used the vertical lines of that case with the split-image rangefinder on my viewing screen to achieve focus. Whatever the case may be, I think those stools being out of focus lends a sense of mysterious depth to the image that the digital version lacks.

I didn’t limit myself to making film versions of compositions I had already shot digitally. There were some other compositions that caught my eye that I never noticed on my earlier nighttime walk around town.

Perhaps the biggest challenge I’ve found with doing nighttime street photography on film is exposing sufficiently. During my earlier attempts with using high-speed film, I badly underexposed many of my photographs. Most often the problem was that I metered too closely to sources of light, which totally confused my light meter into recommending faster exposure times. This time around, I consciously metered shadow areas for which I wanted to preserve detail. In many images, highlights were completely blown out, but I would rather have that if it meant my shadows were getting captured on the negative. I also bracketed more than I typically do. I’m glad I did so because those shots that I gave a bit more exposure time than what my light meter recommended were the ones that were properly exposed. If I shoot at night with Ilford Delta 3200 again, I might go so far as to set my meter’s ASA dial to 1600 and develop the film normally in order to ensure I get properly exposed negatives.

And as far as my general thoughts on Ilford Delta 3200 are concerned, I find myself reassessing it. Earlier in my mini film stock reviews, I noted that I found Ilford Delta 3200 to be less than satisfying to use. Those feelings may have been a product of my poor scanning technique. I confess that I’m still getting getting to know the SilverFast software that came bundled with my Plustek OpticFilm 8200i SE film scanner, particularly the many Negafix profiles that all have a dramatic effect on how a scanned negative appears. For all of the above film images, I used the profile for Kodak T-Max T400 CN, which produced a much more satisfying level of contrast than other profiles I’ve used to scan Ilford Delta 3200 in the past. Moving forward, I need to experiment a bit more with these Negafix profiles.